SUMMER 2012

14 THE DISTRIBUTOR’S

14 THE DISTRIBUTOR’S LINK Computer Insights Inc 108 Third Street, Bloomingdale, IL 60108 Tel: 1-800-539-1233 Email: sales@ci-inc.com www.ci-inc.com STOP MISTAKES AND SAVE TIME WITH CERTIFICATE MANAGEMENT Certificate Management is a Big Problem In the Fastener Industry, maintaining and delivering proper certification is as important as delivering the proper part in many instances. If a part requires certification, it can become a very complicated part to handle. Each part may have varying certification requirements for each customer. When a part like this is purchased, the Fastener Distributor must specify the type of certifications required. That means that someone in the Purchasing Department must specify the requirements when they place the Purchase Order. Warehouse Handling When this part comes in, someone in Receiving or Quality Assurance needs to know what Certification or Certifications (Certs) are needed and they must be certain that they go with the product. Certs are often different for different customer requirements, e.g. it might be Cert to a Boeing number, or simply Mechanical or Chemical Certs or both. The warehouse personnel need to be able to identify the correct lot of the product that has the required Certs on file and they need to be sure that the Certs go out with the product. If any step in this process is missed, there is big trouble. The customer is likely to reject the parts and insist that all the missing documentation be produced. Worse yet, the customer is likely to “write the distributor up” in their Quality System with a nonconformance or problem report. If the distributor gets too many of those, they could lose the customer altogether. Sales Department When a customer orders a part that normally requires Certs, they may or may not specify them this time, even though they need them. When the Customer Service Rep is taking the order, they may or may not remember to specify the correct Certs, even if the customer was quite clear about the requirements. Tight Controls Require Many Manual Steps At each stage of the handling of these parts, there are usually manual safeguards and double checks to assure that the proper Certs go out. This is time consuming and error prone. This checking and rechecking is tedious, time consuming and only partially effective. Problem Solved with The BUSINESS EDGE 2.0 The BUSINESS EDGE 2.0 Certificate Management System offers the ability to receive lot certificates from a vendor and automatically send them to the customer. In conjunction with the documentConnection module, all certificates are stored electronically for easy retrieval. Certificate Categories Each installation of The BUSINESSE EDGE 2.0 creates their own list of certificate types that they want to be able to receive from vendors and give to customers. Each certificate type has a default cost for purchase orders and a default price for sales orders. please turn to page 146